Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Door (Juanita Wilson, Tim Fleming)


        I've been trying to watch some of the shorts and animations that were nominated for Oscars earlier this month, and one that caught my eye was The Door, which was written and directed by Juanita Wilson. The short, which is just shy of seventeen minutes, is based on the "MONOLOGUE ABOUT A WHOLE LIFE WRITTEN DOWN ON DOORS, the testimony of Nikolai Fomich Kalugin", by Svetlana Alexievich, which follows the attested story of a man in post-Chernobyl Pripyat and Kiev.

        As a college photography student who is interested in abandoned spaces, I have on more than one occasion been shown work by photographers who have gone into Pripyat (Robert Polidori being one). Though the photographs are always hauntingly beautiful and extremely sad, they still lack the full story, only representing the general sense of loss and sadness that is present in many photographs of abandoned (for whatever reason) spaces. They, in my opinion, therefor do not effectively convey the absolute devastation the Chernobyl disaster left behind.
        Pripyat is an intriguing place, I have always been entranced by the present-day photographs of the famous ferris-wheel and the whole post-apocalyptic quiet it exudes. The problem is that the photographs are admittedly romanticized, and looking at them often makes me more interested in exploring than considering the disaster that occurred there (and I won't enter certain abandoned spaces such as mental hospitals out of respect of the horrors people had to endure there, so distracting me from who inhabited the space is not easy). The Door manages to strip the space of this romanticism while maintaining a level of beauty. It makes the personal connection that the photographs lack.

        Every frame of The Door could be a photograph. The filming (director of photography: Tim Fleming) is perfect, as is the color palette. The short opens with an unexplained action, a man stealing a door; and evolves into a story of loss and tradition. Just as nothing about the door is without deeper meaning, the short reveals the way in which nothing after Chernobyl was innocuous.
        A faculty member at my school and well-known artist once told me that "nostalgia is just memory without pain". While I can not fully agree with this statement (particularly in the context in which it was given), watching this film gave me an insight into what she was trying to say. The photographs are beautiful and nostalgic. They show the literal surface of Pripyat. The Door gives a truer (as it is not only based off a testimonial but structured in the same way as a memory) understanding of Pripyat and the memories that are trapped within it. As Toni Morrison would put it, the "rememories".
        The Door may be a short, but in the seventeen minutes they have accomplished everything about a place which other mediums and artists have been trying to capture for years.

The entire film as well as more information are available here.
*be warned that parts of it are not easy to watch, but it is definitely worth it.




images: screenshots from The Door.

Monday, March 29, 2010

iamamiwhoami


        Back for good and for real. I was originally intending to write a post on one of the many artists I've bookmarked over my absence, but because it is currently very late in the evening (or rather early in the morning) and I've been animating all day and have therefore lost my mind, I'll leave you with something a little more cryptic, which I stumbled upon today.

        A YouTube user by the name of "iamamiwhoami", has been periodically posting one-odd minute videos which I can not make heads or tails of, but am absolutely fully drawn to. I'm guessing that the channel belongs to the girl in every video (so I'll refer to the artist as she for now), but I am not claiming to know this as the whole thing is currently some sort of big secret. Quite a few commenters have theories as to who the girl is, but none of them are people that I'm familiar with, so I will not go there. (Her most recent video, posted two weeks ago, which jumps from one to almost five minutes in length, suggests that she is a musician.) This is the video that I first encountered, and is actually my least favorite, although it is still extremely intriguing, a little terrifying, and somehow beautiful.
        The video reminds me of a dream I might have if I had a cold and went to bed with some Sudafed having just watched the scene with the hand-eyed monster in Pan's Labyrinth. Creepy and wonderful. I thought at first that the stretching/bending of some of the shots might bother me (it often reads more as just "effect" than actually adding anything), but I came away less concerned about it and more involved in the general bizarreness of it all (her long eyelashes around hauntingly blue eyes, the strange men looking on), it has some really beautiful moments.
        I was more interested however, in the six shorter uploads, which seem to be pieces to one big puzzle, although they don't fit quite exactly. You'll have to watch them yourselves, as it is difficult to put my finger on what exactly draws me to them, but they are really beautifully filmed, and the editing goes well with the sound/music.
        I'm also really interested in the way the work is being released (in little snippets, and anonymously), and think that it's almost equally as conceptually important as the work itself, but that is a whole other discussion and I am way too exhausted for it. In any case, watch the videos, they're wonderfully bizarre.

iamamiwhoami's youtube channel




images: screen shots of iamamiwhoami's recent videos